It is a true and rugged challenge to deal with the deprivation factor of disallowing ones’ self a piece of chocolate cake to ease the psychic weariness and isolation on so many levels of chronic illness.

But after awhile the feel-good-factor wins out and I live vicariously from the pleasure in others pleasure.

And I stand tall and fully engaged in life more often than ever before as I inch my way toward a healthier me.

Here is a little preamble about bacteria as an intro to the full article here.

For two million years humans co evolved with the bacteria that live our our skin and in our guts. We learned how to use the byproducts from the 100 trillion bacteria and parasites who were our OLD FRIENDS. We incorporated those bacterial byproducts into our biology and knew how to eliminate those that interfered with our own biology.

Then six thousand years ago ( a blink of an eye in terms of evolution) we began to eat grass seeds (grains), and then dairy and then legumes. With those new foods stuffs we introduced new bacteria into our guts. As we increased the amount of grain, dairy and legumes that we ate, these new bacteria grew in larger and larger numbers in our guts. In the last two hundred years we began to eat white flour, and more white sugar. In the last fifty years we added high fructose corn syrup. Now we have some who are getting thirty, forty and even fifty percent or more of their calories from white flour, sugar and high fructose corn syrup. For those, the bacteria living in their bowels, are very different from the bacterial OLD FRIENDS that had lived in out bowels for millions of years.

When we eat so much sugar, white flour and high fructose syrups – the sugar loving bacteria, clostridium difficile, streptococcus, pseudomonas and staphylococcus, and sugar loving yeasts, candida albicans, thrive and our OLD FRIENDS wither and we are more likely to have diabetes, heart disease, mental health problems, autoimmune problems and severe obesity. Having the wrong bacteria in your gut can make your MS much more difficult to stabilize.